11 December 2009

Anyone who reads the papers sees stories — or hype — about
cyberwarfare. Can it happen? Has it already happened, in
Estonia
or
Georgia?
There has even been a Rand Corporation
study
on cyberwarfare and cyberdeterrence.
I wonder, though, if real cyberwarfare might be more subtle — perhaps
a "cyber cold war"?

A case in point is the recent release of hacked — stolen —
emails
on climate change
from the
University of East Anglia.
A British publication, The Independent, has
published
a story
saying that Russian secret services may have been behind the hack,
for diplomatic reasons.

This time, if it was indeed the FSB behind the leak, it could be
part of a ploy to delay negotiations or win further concessions
for Moscow. Russia, along with the United States, was accused of
delaying Kyoto, and the signals coming from Moscow recently have
continued to dismay environmental activists.

We comonly associate warfare with armies that use so-called "kinetic weapons"
against each other and against the opposing country. That need not be
the only form warfare can take.
Zhou Enlai,
for example,
once remarked that "diplomacy is a continuation of war by other
means." In the science fiction realm,
Poul Anderson
wrote a story "State of Assassination" (also known as "A Man to My
Wounding") about war being replaced by a state of assassination.
Instead of brute force attacks with atomic weapons, countries
have switched to killing each others' leaders. But one side
has gone a step further, and started targeting others.

As the Rand report has pointed out, "certainty in predicting the effects
of cyberattacks is undermined by the same complexity that makes
cyberattacks possible in the first place" (p. xiv). The report
goes on to stress how unclear the effects of a massive cyberattack would
be. Perhaps this sort of
narrowly-targeted operation, in support of "diplomacy"
is the real future of warfare.